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Andrew Michael Hurley

The Summer People from Shirley Jackson

I encountered this story long ago and it has lingered with me ever since. The named seasonal visitors happen to be a family urban dwellers, who rent the same remote lakeside house every summer. On this occasion, rather than returning home, they choose to prolong their holiday for a month longer – a decision that to disturb all the locals in the adjacent village. Each repeats an identical cryptic advice that no one has ever stayed in the area past the holiday. Even so, the Allisons are determined to remain, and at that point situations commence to become stranger. The person who brings oil refuses to sell to the couple. Nobody will deliver food to the cottage, and at the time the family attempt to go to the village, their vehicle fails to start. A storm gathers, the batteries within the device diminish, and when night comes, “the aged individuals clung to each other within their rental and anticipated”. What could be the Allisons anticipating? What do the townspeople know? Every time I revisit this author’s unnerving and thought-provoking narrative, I remember that the finest fright stems from the unspoken.

Mariana Enríquez

Ringing the Changes by a noted author

In this short story two people travel to a typical beach community in which chimes sound continuously, a perpetual pealing that is bothersome and puzzling. The initial extremely terrifying moment occurs after dark, when they decide to walk around and they are unable to locate the water. Sand is present, there’s the smell of decaying seafood and brine, there are waves, but the water is a ghost, or a different entity and worse. It is simply profoundly ominous and each occasion I travel to a beach in the evening I remember this tale which spoiled the ocean after dark for me – favorably.

The young couple – she’s very young, he’s not – head back to the hotel and learn the cause of the ringing, through an extended episode of claustrophobia, necro-orgy and demise and innocence encounters danse macabre pandemonium. It’s an unnerving reflection regarding craving and decline, two bodies maturing in tandem as spouses, the bond and violence and affection of marriage.

Not merely the most frightening, but likely a top example of short stories available, and a personal favourite. I read it in Spanish, in the initial publication of this author’s works to appear in this country a decade ago.

Catriona Ward

Zombie by an esteemed writer

I delved into Zombie by a pool overseas in 2020. Although it was sunny I felt an icy feeling over me. I also experienced the electricity of fascination. I was composing a new project, and I encountered an obstacle. I wasn’t sure whether there existed any good way to write some of the fearful things the book contains. Experiencing this novel, I understood that it was possible.

Published in 1995, the novel is a bleak exploration through the mind of a criminal, Quentin P, inspired by an infamous individual, the murderer who murdered and dismembered 17 young men and boys in the Midwest between 1978 and 1991. As is well-known, the killer was fixated with producing a compliant victim who would never leave with him and made many grisly attempts to achieve this.

The actions the book depicts are horrific, but similarly terrifying is its mental realism. The protagonist’s terrible, shattered existence is simply narrated using minimal words, names redacted. The audience is immersed caught in his thoughts, compelled to see thoughts and actions that horrify. The strangeness of his thinking resembles a tangible impact – or getting lost in an empty realm. Entering this book is not just reading but a complete immersion. You are swallowed whole.

An Accomplished Author

A Haunting Novel by Helen Oyeyemi

In my early years, I was a somnambulist and eventually began experiencing nightmares. On one occasion, the terror involved a nightmare where I was confined in a box and, upon awakening, I realized that I had ripped a piece from the window, trying to get out. That home was falling apart; when it rained heavily the entranceway flooded, fly larvae fell from the ceiling on to my parents’ bed, and once a big rodent scaled the curtains in the bedroom.

Once a companion presented me with Helen Oyeyemi’s novel, I was no longer living with my parents, but the narrative regarding the building perched on the cliffs felt familiar in my view, longing as I felt. It is a book featuring a possessed clamorous, emotional house and a girl who eats limestone off the rocks. I cherished the book deeply and came back frequently to the story, always finding {something